Nathan Crilly

‘Design thinking’ and its relationship to other disciplinary approaches

Efforts to promote creativity often centre on encouraging people to engage in ‘design thinking’. Although this term has many different meanings, many of these meanings centre on the idea that even non-designers should behave more like designers. That is, people should treat whatever they are influencing as though it is something they are designing, whether that is a service, an organisation, some legislation, a piece of policy or anything else. The application of design thinking to these projects might include (amongst other things) an emphasis on developing an understanding for users, visualising ideas and iteratively testing prototype solutions. Although design thinking is often considered in isolation, it can easily be connected to approaches such as ‘systems thinking’ and ‘entrepreneurial thinking,’ which are also relevant to how problems are identified, framed and solved. In this talk, I’ll consider how these different approaches are related to each other, and how they are related to other similar approaches from other disciplines that might support us in undertaking creative work.

April, 23, 2024 – 6pm (GMT+1 – Lisbon & London time)
Moderator: António Lucas Soares, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

Bio
Nathan Crilly is Professor of Design at the University of Cambridge, where he researches human behaviour as it relates to design. This includes studying the behaviour of the people doing design work (e.g. designers’ creativity), and the experiences of those people who interact with design outcomes (e.g. users’ experiences). Nathan teaches design, creativity and communication at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He also teaches design thinking at the executive level, promoting innovation across a broad range of business sectors. Nathan plans, manages and conducts commercial research to deliver user insights for design projects focused on various markets, including consumer health, digital devices and sporting equipment.

Watch here